Actor Tim Robbins was not happy when told he would have to vote by provisional ballot in New York on Tuesday, TMZ.com is reporting.

The actor and well-known liberal activist became enraged when officials at his usual polling location in New York informed him that his name was not on the register, the Web site reports. When poll workers asked him to fill out a provisional ballot, he reportedly refused, and an altercation ensued, resulting in cops coming to the scene.

Determined to vote, Robbins went all the way to the City Board of Elections to obtain proof that he was a registered voter, TMZ.com says.

TMZ.com later caught up with the “Shawshank Redemption” star, who told them that he was “not the only one [who had a problem voting.]”

“While I was waiting, according to poll workers, 30 people in the first five hours of voting have been taken off the rolls, so you do the math on that. Six per hour, per district across America…”

Before disappearing to finalize his Election Day business, Robbins told TMZ.com to “go vote!”

Click here see the video and read more from TMZ.com.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Democratic Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, granting her a stay on Friday to a temporary restraining order from the 6th Circuit Court that ordered her to provide a system for implementing voter fraud prevention methods.

The decision by the full court repudiates the lower court’s ruling siding with the Ohio Republican Party and ordering Brunner to verify records of about 200,000 of 666,000 new voters this year whose driver’s license and Social Security records don’t match information in other government databases.

Hedging her bets, Brunner filed a motion late Thursday night asking the federal appeals court to extend or modify an earlier order to come up with a system to help counties verify voter eligibility.

Circuit Court Judge George Smith set the completion time for Brunner to come up with a method for validating mismatched voter registration data at midnight Saturday. Brunner, who filed a request for a stay of the order with the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, asked for a two-week extension so she could be compliant if the high court didn’t see her way.

The Ohio Republican Party filed the initial suit challenging the state’s compliance with the Help America Vote Act, alleging that the state has no system to deal with mismatched voter records.

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the GOP. Brunner responded with an appeal to the high court.

In its reply brief to the Supreme Court, the Ohio GOP said if Brunner needed relief from the temporary restraining order then she should seek it from Smith, who issued the ruling.

Click here to read the Supreme Court’s decision.

WASHINGTON: Barack Obama says he only had limited ties to ACORN, and they began in 1995. But other encounters with the group, plus a voter-registration drive he conducted called Project Vote three years earlier, calls his account into question.

Barack Obama speaks at the final presidential debate in Hempstead, N.Y., Wednesday. (AP Photo)

Twice in the last week, Barack Obama has said his relationship with ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — began and ended with legal work he did for the group in 1995.

The Democratic presidential candidate made his remarks in an effort to distance himself from the low-income advocacy group, which is under investigation for voter fraud in several states.

But that assertion is subject to debate. Obama conducted training sessions for ACORN workers a decade ago, and his campaign also recently paid an ACORN subsidiary for canvassing efforts.

Plus his work with a group called Project Vote back in 1992 raises questions about whether he was involved with ACORN back then.

Project Vote was one of Obama’s earliest political successes. As director of Illinois Project Vote, Obama helped register 150,000 new voters in Chicago, and he was heralded for his efforts in local media.

ACORN was also registering voters at that time, and its relationship with Project Vote casts some doubt on Obama’s statement that his involvement with ACORN didn’t begin until three years later.

Obama’s campaign Web site — in a section called “Fight the Smears” that is devoted to shooting down harmful rumors about his candidacy — states as “fact” that “ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.”

The site also states, “Barack Obama never organized with ACORN.”

But accounts from the 1992 voter drive suggest the two groups were at least working alongside each other, if not together.

A blogger for Obama’s campaign Web site in February wrote: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer … Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. … Even before I was an elected official, when I ran (the) Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it.’”

Also, Chicago ACORN organizer Toni Foulkes wrote in the 2003 edition of the journal Social Policy that the two groups were working to register voters when Obama led the effort in Illinois.

She wrote that Obama and Project Vote made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win her Senate seat in 1992, and that “Project Vote delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).”

But ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg told FOXNews.com “there was no work done between Project Vote and ACORN” during the 1992 Chicago drive.

“There was no financial intermingling,” he added.

Goldberg said the groups, rather, conducted “parallel” efforts to register voters.

Asked about the 1992 project, the Obama campaign referred FOXNews.com to a July letter to the editor in The Wall Street Journal from Sanford Newman, who was director of Project Vote in 1992.

Newman wrote that Obama worked for his organization, not ACORN, and that “it wasn’t until after Mr. Obama’s tenure had ended that it began to conduct projects more frequently with ACORN than with other community-based organizations.”

He wrote that Project Vote “remains a separate organization today.”

Goldberg also told FOXNews.com the two organizations are still separate, even though they now work together on voter registration.

On that issue, the two organizations seem to have maintained a close and open relationship in recent years.

Project Vote announced last week that together with ACORN they registered over 1.3 million people to vote. Project Vote is listed on the ACORN Web site as one of many “allied organizations.” The two organizations also share an office address in Arkansas and Washington, D.C. According to ACORN, the office-sharing is a cost-saving move done for “convenience.”

But as to Obama’s statement that his ties to ACORN are contained to his legal work, it has already been widely reported that his campaign paid more than $800,000 to a group called Citizens Services Inc., an ACORN subsidiary, to “augment” Obama’s grassroots organizing efforts in the Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania primaries.

His campaign maintains those efforts were for getting voters to the polls and not for voter registration, which is the sticking point of ongoing ACORN probes.

Goldberg also confirmed to FOXNews.com that Obama gave two training sessions over the course of three years in the late ’90s. He said each session lasted an hour or less.

Republicans say Obama can’t deny his relationship with ACORN.

“[Obama's] relationship with ACORN is well-established,” said Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz. “His comment is a fabrication.”

But Obama’s carefully worded statement regarding ACORN training on his “Fight the Smears” site appears to be true.

The statement says ACORN never “hired” Obama “as a trainer, organizer or any type of employee.”

And Goldberg said that, in fact, “Barack was not paid.”

Diaz noted that Obama changed his Web site to reflect the training sessions — it previously said the Illinois senator was never an ACORN trainer. The word, “hired,” was added later.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday, asking the high court to intervene in a dispute over whether the state must do more to help counties verify voter eligibility.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (Jenniferbrunner.com)

Brunner said a temporary restraining order preventing the state from offering witnesses to explain “how the complex database system works” will allow challenges at the county level to fully qualified voters and could “severely disrupt the voting process.”

In her court filing, Brunner, the state’s top elections chief, called the suit filed by the Ohio Republican Party “baseless” and suggested she can’t comply with the order from the lower court.

“As things now stand, the secretary must reprogram the statewide voter registration database by Friday — after Ohioans have begun voting, and as she and the 88 county boards of elections are undertaking other efforts to ensure that the general election in Ohio will be a smooth one,” she wrote.

On Tuesday, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sided with the GOP and ordered Brunner, a Democrat, to set up a system that provides names of newly registered voters whose driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers don’t match records in other government databases.

The GOP contends the information will help prevent fraud. Brunner, a Democrat, has called the issue a veiled attempt at disenfranchising voters and that other checks exist to help determine eligibility.

In a statement released almost immediately after Brunner’s appeal, state GOP chairman Kevin DeWine said Brunner should’ve instituted changes long ago, before the time crunch of the election.

“This is a shameful mess, and Ohioans are rapidly losing confidence in Secretary Brunner’s ability to protect the integrity of this election,” DeWine said.

“Jennifer Brunner dropped a bombshell on Wednesday in revealing that as many as 200,000 registrations contain bad information, and she’s arrogantly fighting every effort to validate these questionable forms. She apparently lied to the media on Wednesday when her office vowed to comply with the district court’s order. It’s time to stop wasting valuable tax dollars and start fulfilling her legal obligations,” he continued.

Justice John Paul Stevens oversees the 6th Circuit and is in receipt of the filing. He has the option to deny the appeal outright or he can take it to the full court for consideration. If he rejects the appeal, the secretary of state has the option of sending it back under another judge.

In a statement accompanying the filing, Brunner blamed the ruling on politics. “Like so many recent controversies, this issue has been raised less than one month before the election — and it was only raised by one political party,” she said.

“Ohio has longstanding election law safeguards, such as confirmation cards for new registrants, and a bipartisan structure for boards and polling places. Ohioans can be confident that voter registration fraud by some paid registration workers will not translate into illegal voting in our state,” she said.

In noting that Ohio’s voter registration follows federal law, Brunner suggested that the bipartisan boards of elections in the state develop a means to protect election officials from litigation when they don’t purge mismatched data as well as “a solution” that includes a uniform process for all 88 counties to compare mismatched data; protect voters who are wrongly purged; and upgrade a voter query system that will guide counties on what to do with the information.

Click here to read Secretary of State Brunner’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

CINCINNATI — A federal appeals court has ordered Ohio’s top elections official to set up a system by Friday to verify new voters’ eligibility.

The full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has upheld an earlier ruling that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has to use other government records to check the thousands of new voters for registration fraud. A three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit had disagreed last week, but the full court’s ruling trumps the panel’s decision.

Ohio Republicans sued Brunner, a Democrat.

Ohio GOP Chairman Bob Bennett calls the ruling a victory for the election’s integrity.
A spokesman for Brunner could not immediately be reached for comment. Brunner previously said there was no way to set up the system with such speed.